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  1. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    Notice I said "passive", as in, "not taking up actions." Also as I recall, it didn't work a lot even for characters avowedly good at it, and only helped so much even when they did (I will again note it has been a very long time though, so there could be something I'm forgetting). This assumes...
  2. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    There's a reason I call those people-with-powers settings rather than superhero ones.
  3. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    Oddly enough, its not really a deconstruction (except to the degree Omni-Man is a dark Superman, but then, those are a dime a dozen these days). Its just a fairly conventional superhero setting missing one element.
  4. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    If I recall, part of the problem was MSH didn't have too much in the way of passive (as in, not taking up actions) avoidance. That's a real problem for characters like Daredevil or Spider-Man who are heavily based around it.
  5. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    I have to point out open-ended modelling can be done in any game ever, in or out of the superhero genre. Saying you can do that doesn't say much.
  6. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    Yeah, but not everyone is there to play Invincible (or worse), and the alternate rule for damage in WT swung too much the other way; it didn't make you just less brittle, it made everything stun damage effectively.
  7. Thomas Shey

    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    Its not that uncommon, honestly. In most games (at least in the more or less trad sphere) the role of GM and player are different enough that things you appreciate in one role may, at best, be uninteresting to you in the other.
  8. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    It still suffered in some area from playing the "price by rarity" game which I think works really badly with superheroes at least. I felt unqualified to say since, while I think I own the 4e Powers book in PDF, I haven't really had the wherewithal to read it.
  9. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    This was actually one of the problems for people trying to play conventional supers with Wild Talents (and the fix they had for it swung too far the other way).
  10. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    GURPS was probably the last game I'd have tried to have work with superheroes (as compared to people-with-powers) because so many of its assumptions fight it. And best I can tell at least with the pre-4e versions, it worked about as well as I expected.
  11. Thomas Shey

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    As an aside, this is also how 13th Age mooks work.
  12. Thomas Shey

    What are your thoughts on TTRPGs with non-standard dice?

    I don't remember the exact number, but Back in the Day our SR1e decker had to be given a bowl to roll all his D6 in, which suggests to me it may have been in the 30-40 range.
  13. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    Yeah, as I referenced earlier, you saw a lot of this with representing speedsters; the simple, stupid and over-expensive way to do some of it was to throw a bunch of Speed at them, but as Ruin Explorer refenced above, that didn't actually represent the way you saw them work in most of the source...
  14. Thomas Shey

    What are your thoughts on TTRPGs with non-standard dice?

    Well, it doesn't help that some people are simultaneously critical of D&D, but really vague about what parts they don't like and whether its a generic dislike or a contextual one. I try mostly not to discuss my general dislike of D&D proper (and to a less degree of its kin) because I'd have to...
  15. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    There's always been a tendency with NPC writeups to just write down whatever and ignore perfectly functional build constructs that any actual player trying for the effect would do. Anytime I ever saw a Hero (or even M&M far as that goes) character with multiple full cost offensive powers on...
  16. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    Yup; in M&M, you also ran into some of the ways some offensive abilities interacted with Hero Points and GM Fiat. In practice after running two and playing in three fairly lengthy M&M campaigns, it became abundantly clear the best thing to do most of the time was just hammer away with damage...
  17. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    This is all a fair argument; a lot of it will depend on what you think he needs in the way of Talents (if any) and how much you tie up in the Batcave and a couple of the vehicles (if you're basing the Batplane on the DCAU version its pretty punchy). (I'm betting that Magneto build was...
  18. Thomas Shey

    Does Anyone Care? (Cosmere RPG)

    One has to remember Netflix has a very specific metric about continuing a show (other streamers may sometimes do something similar, but Netiflix is very blunt about it); "Is this show bringing in new subscriptions?" I'm not sure exactly how they decide that, but at the point it isn't, they...
  19. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    I'm afraid I just don't see it that way, and I've certainly known a lot of comics fans that don't. I don't know this part of this argument can be anything but a question of taste and perception. (The only think I might agree with is there's problems representing the movement speed of supers on...
  20. Thomas Shey

    What makes a successful superhero game?

    One of the factors that mitigated any tendency to just treat it as all super fights all the time (at least when it was actually paid attention to) was the Disadvantage system was essentially mandatory. Some of those were primarily combat related like Vulnerabilities and Susceptibilities, but...
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